Ain’t gonna play Sun City

July 2, 2001

Après lui, le déluge!

Like Solzhenitsyn, Allende, Amelio and other storied literary exiles, The Gay Blade
has kept the flame of freedom burning brightly in his own hearth awaiting the
day when its light would again illuminate the darkest corners of his beleaguered homeland. Praise Pasternak, the moment of
ignition may finally be at hand!

The ceaseless winds of international justice have finally snapped the corroded strings supporting the puppet government of
the oppressor.

And although he can’t go home again – his natal neighborhood
was long since condemned as a hotbed of sedition and razed by a team of whey-faced
apparatchiks – the Blade still holds his torch aloft in the hope that
the surviving rump state of a
once-proud union is
finally ready to turn a new page, vault out of the dark ages and land
somewhere within spitting distance of civilized society.

The Blade only hopes he still has the saliva to do the job!

Atlas shrugged

The Blade isn’t the only one working up a juicy stream of
self-expression; consider the latest efforts of his fellow travelers,
who have coughed up a slick gobbet of information about the next
Power Mac G4.

The new system, code-named Titan and slated to slide home at this
month’s Macworld Expo/New York, will feature a redesigned front panel
that includes curvaceous new drive bays and a bodacious new speaker.
While the full range of processor speeds has yet to wash over the
Blade’s transom, the figure 866MHz looms large in his lexicon.

Even as Titan heads for the door, some final hitches have delayed the
delivery of Puma, the long-awaited point-one release of Mac OS X.
According to the Blade’s army of politically active immigrant
waitrons, Puma is now due to ship a few weeks after the Expo; since
the OS is being optimized for the latest Mac releases, Titan probably
won’t hit virtual or actual shelves ahead of the big cat.